The Unthinkable Present: Blogging at ITC2015

I’m pleased to (semi) formally announce that I’ll be the official blogger this year at the 2015 Integral Theory Conference [1], happening at Sonoma State University, CA. This year’s theme is “Integral Impacts: Using Integrative Metatheories to Catalyze Effective Change.” The conference, hosted by MetaIntegral, is effectively an appraisal. A call to task for metatheories proper. From ITC’s call for papers:

Integral Theory is currently being applied in over 35 distinct disciplines and yet there has been relatively very little work done to demonstrate how an integral approach is more valuable, more effective, and more sustainable. So while it is generally assumed an integral approach is better than a non-integral approach we have not made a very strong case to our non-integral colleagues that integral approaches are more impactful.

This focus builds on the momentum of the 2013 conference, where we expanded the field of discourse to include multiple integrative metatheories. Now we are asking ourselves how do we engage and apply these integrative metatheories in a way that is most impactful in terms of the kinds of changes we want to create in the world around us.

“Metatheory.” Do theories need to be meta? Before there was internet-speak, “meta” was for the classic geeks. Mathematics. Social sciences. The popularity of metatheories, like grand narratives, has ebbed and flowed over decades in academe. For now, anyway, it might be the case that they are making a comeback. In a complex, planetary civilization where human beings run on different models of reality – and with our systems of knowledge becoming so very highly specialized – “meta” thinking is beginning to sound favorable. Hence we the image of the pomegranate above. If meta theories – and therefore “integral” thinking, be it Roy Bhaskar’s Critical Realism or Meta Realism, or Edgar Morin’s Complexity Thinking – are going to properly orient us for an interconnected and complex, networked future, then we’d better hope our theories are up for the task. We’d better hope our theories can begin to do what Gregory Bateson described as finding “the patterns that connect.” Our theories, if they are worth their salt, should mirror the intricacy – and complexity – of the natural world.

Back to the pomegranate.

Technically speaking, this delicious fruit has been the symbol of fertility since antiquity. By that note, perhaps 2013’s Integral Conference – for which I analogized meta theories “having sex” [2] and developing novel mutations – is not unrelated here. In fact, perhaps we could see the pomegranate as a good symbol for the integral harvest. “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” wrote Matthew [3]. Integral Theory, along with meta theory proper, is called to task – can they help the world? If so, how?

With the East Coast intellectual sobriety blasting down on my philosophical romanticism like New York’s desolate 2015 winter, I feel a contentious relationship with meta theories. I want to believe they’re worth their salt. I want to know what their impact truly is. At times, I wished for the gates of academe, with its razor sharp maw toothed by critical theory and social justice and activism, to bear down on Integral Theory. Then, and only then, I thought, could Integral Theory and meta theories like it be in touch enough, be a voice articulate enough, to have impact. I still feel this to be a good metric to carry with me into the conference, but I also recognize something essential here.

From Edgar Morin’s notion of Complexity Thinking, to Bateson’s “Ecology of Mind,” to William Irwin Thompson’s “wissenkunst” (“knowledge-art”) and the power of creative, artistic sensitivity to concretize beyond the limits of what integral thinker Jean Gebser articulated as the mental “ratio,” a new type of thinking for our species has become virtually necessary. So here’s the caveat. As the most astute of these meta thinkers have pointed out, if a new thinking is emergent and nascent in the human populace, we will find it living and breathing in the cultures we journey to in search of it. It will whisper in the dark, remain hidden from pure analysis and datum. It will reveal itself as the unspoken art and become a secret to itself, hidden in plain site within the texts and artifacts of human consciousness. Our art, science, and knowledge in their amalgam tell us more than we know. In the clammering noise of global suffering and confusion there begets new knowledge. The serpent – like Quetzalcoatl, the Mexican god of Knowledge – will be found here a tail, there a scale, buried in the fragments of art and culture like a vast and coiled dragon. It is alive and biding its time. Our task, as William Gibson put it, is to become sensitive enough to recognize an “unthinkable present.”

Gebser spent the better part of his life studying poetry for this very reason. To articulate the new voice. To say what was already being spoken to us, through us. It is very important to listen if one is to cognize the so-called evolution of consciousness.

So, are we listening?

That, to me, would be the beginning of any kind of integral impact. One must be affected by “it” to have effected the world.

To do any kind of conference we should ask ourselves: what are we being impacted by, anyway? What is the integral impact on us? What fruits are we yielding in turn?

If you like this kind of writing, and want to follow me through the conference, then I suggest following me on this journey by subscribing to this blog. I’ll be posting regular content about the conference from here.

Notes:

[3] By contrast, through association with Persephone and the Underworld, the pomegranate is also connected to death. Fertility and mortality. A fitting, dynamic image to represent the notion of an integral harvest – reaping and sowing.

Express extra joyful thanks
whenever they feel as one
… even when they don’t —
gratefulness in both
the soaking and the squeezing,
breathing in and breathing out
the Love of Life
the Love of G-d –
“Outrageous Love”.

ron bell
======================

Infinity Close Up

What’s the most powerful
force in the world —
that moves stars
in their courses,
blood through our bodies,
hopes in our hearts?

When I hear a new born baby cry,
feel a family member die,
watch birds across some water fly,
in field of grass and flowers lie,
I know … I know …
and knowingly sigh.